Adam: The First Robot Scientist

Lots of readers are sending links to the announcement of the first
known instance in which a
machine has discovered new scientific knowledge on its own.
Scientists at Aberystwyth University created an artificially intelligent
machine, known
as Adam for various reasons. The machine formed a theory about
yeast enzyme genetics, made predictions from the theory, devised
experiments to test the theory, ran the experiments using lab robotics,
and interpreted the results. Adam recorded and documented the entire
process in far more detail than human scientists are usually able to
achieve. Humans
scientists analyzed Adam's theory and manually conducted experiments
confirming Adam's conclusion. Given how many humans seem unable to grasp
how the scientific method
works, it's pretty impressive news that even a primitive AI can handle
it! The researchers are working on a second
generation machine, named Eve, that they hope will be much more
efficient than Adam. For more, see the Robot
Scientist website, which includes many more photos
and diagrams
of Adam. There's also some video of Adam
in action. For all the technical details see the paper, The
Automation of Science (PDF format).